Set vob links

voblinks is a script to ease the maintenance of HP-UX in the context of our using significant portions of it from a ClearCase vob.

• Purpose
• Location
• Usage
• Design and restrictions

Purpose

The problem is of course that at boot time, ClearCase is not available before late in runlevel 2 (?). This is a problem e.g. for installing patches, which may need an automatic reboot, or even a recompilation of the kernel.

This script allows thus an installer to restore a standard situation (all of HP-UX found from standard unix directories), before performing a maintenance task, then to set back our default configuration.

Obviously, the vob copies of the HP-UX components should be upgraded separately in case they have been modified.

Usage

The script is intended to be used (first opiton) through soft links, the name of which selects the desired function. Three functions are provided:

setvoblinks

Set up the ClearCase based configuration

resetvoblinks

Reset the system configuration to normal: HP-UX components found from unix directories

checkvoblinks

Check what is the current configuration, and in case the links to the vob are in place, whether the list of links known to the script itself does indeed match the configuration. This function requires that /usr/bin be mounted.

The script may also (second option) be used as voblinks with one argument: set, reset or check.

Design and restrictions

It is written to support sirion, feanor and mahtan. It may be extended for our old hosts later.

Ideally. it shouldn't rely on anything not in /sbin (of course, it could be run first in normal mode, but this may be an annoying restriction). Currently it uses uname to check the host, which fails e.g. on sinkku since uname is only found there in /usr/bin... To support mahtan, we had to copy uname to /sbin...

The script currently supports 3 vobs, For simplicity, it relies upon the convention that the links point to homonymous directories under the vobs roots (full path appended).
The same links are not visible from all three hosts in the same way. The flexibility in this respect is very restricted.

Location

It is currently itself found in a vob, but also available from the local unix directories /root/bin. The reasons are:

• The script should be accessible when ClearCase is not up, e.g. at boot time